


Ripples

by We_Have_Become_Anathema



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But the building blocks are there., Gen, Gods, Madness, You have to squint to see the pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 07:46:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1420174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/We_Have_Become_Anathema/pseuds/We_Have_Become_Anathema
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story had been told in fragments before, an errant sentence while in line to a movie theatre, a sonic vista described while stopped at a rest station, the final whispered words in the dark of a hotel room. Sam was starting to wonder if he’d ever hear it all and get a cohesive picture of the odd fellow he’d been traveling with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ripples

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Ondulações](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2502125) by [VihStark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VihStark/pseuds/VihStark)



“It isn’t so much the slow death that I mind,” Lucifer said as he brought back his arm, “it’s the unendurable loneliness.” His arm was a blur as he snapped his wrist and let fly the smooth stone, the ripples spreading over the tranquil lake as the river stone skipped again and again and again.

“Loneliness?” Sam asked from further down the rocky shoreline, crouched over his knees as he inspected likely candidates.

Hands in his pockets Lucifer didn’t immediately respond, merely stood watching those ripples collide and ever so slowly dissipate without leaving a trace. His fate didn’t really sound so different. “I had worshipers once.”

The story had been told in fragments before, an errant sentence while in line to a movie theatre, a sonic vista described while stopped at a rest station, the final whispered words in the dark of a hotel room. Sam was starting to wonder if he’d ever hear it all and get a cohesive picture of the odd fellow he’d been traveling with.

When had he met Lucifer? Three months ago now? And all he could really say was the man seemed to be an addled philanthropist. The delusions of grandeur and death fixation probably came from some terminal disease.

“Worshipers? This was back when you were a god, right?” Sam had to be careful not to laugh at this particular notion.

_Lucifer? A god?_

He looked over at the older man, something timeless and a bit shabby in his appearance. Soft spoken with a voice made for stories, eyes that held a wealth of sorrow so vast and deep that Sam’s own miserable past wouldn’t have been more than a drop in that ocean. Whatever had stripped Lucifer of his vitality and sanity must have been cataclysmic.

 _Like losing your fiancé?_ asked an insidious voice from his own past.

No, worse than that. Had to be. He’d managed to, well, function after her.

He didn’t think he could call Lucifer functional.

“You don’t stop being a god just because people forget about you,” Lucifer said, voice almost lost to the autumn breeze. “You just start fading.” The melancholy that was woven through that statement hurt to hear, the despondency of the dying.

Sam turned a smooth river stone over in his hand and studied a vein of quartz that transected it, he didn’t feel he could watch Lucifer as he spoke about this. “Yeah?” he muttered, more to fill the yawning silence than any real input.

“Fading isn’t so bad, just the loneliness. My plumage is gone, my scales are gone, but I still have the endless road, and there will always be someone who can use my grace.”

Grace, this crazy mystical energy that Lucifer had detailed once for him. Flowing life-force that spontaneously generated between god and worshiper, a perfectly renewable resource - unless you had no worshipers.

“Hey,” Sam tossed the stone, the plunk as it hit the water satisfying even if he hadn’t gotten it to skip, “why are your worshipers gone?” _Did you lose them? Were you an evil god and ate them?_ Thoughts and unasked questions bounced around inside his skull, never quite important enough to ask.

Lucifer turned to look at Sam, the haunted shadow in his eyes bleeding into the air like winter’s chill. “They were killed.” Simple, direct, never volunteering more information than absolutely necessary.

That infuriated Sam most days; why bring all this shit up in the first place only to suddenly clam up and fall silent?

“Okay, I’ll bite, who killed them? You keep starting this story, why not just finish it?”

“Sometimes there’s healing in a telling, other times there’s only agony and remorse.” Walking out into ankle deep water, Lucifer didn’t seem fazed by the fact that his shoes were getting soaked through with cold, cold water. “There was another god who killed them. My name was stricken from the records, my mythos vilified or eradicated all together. A forgotten god.”

“Yeah, we get that you’re tragic,” Sam mumbled under his breath, not loud enough for Lucifer to hear.

“His name,” Lucifer paused, but when he finished it was on a dying whisper, “was Michael.”

 _In keeping with the biblical allegory, fine._ Sam almost wished he’d taken more classes on psychology; Lucifer would have made a perfect case study for some sort of neurosis, surely. “I take it you were close?” There was none of the rage that he imagined should be in that statement if Lucifer had hated this Michael, only the dumb, animal hurt of betrayal.

“Have you ever had a brother whom you loved more than yourself?”

The question caught Sam off guard, his mind immediately latching onto the memory of Dean with the same hurt that he’d heard in Lucifer’s voice. His chest unexpectedly burned as he forced out a strangled breath. He hadn’t told Lucifer about himself, simply accepted a ride down Route 66 and kept travelling on with him each time Lucifer headed out.

Damn, If Lucifer had been betrayed by a brother, well, then maybe Sam could understand hiding in a pleasant dream rather than a harsh reality. Still, thinking you were a god seemed an extreme route to take.

“Michael was as near to a brother as any could be, as gods are not born of flesh and blood. It was on his feast day when he killed them, the height of his power. My poor flock…” Lucifer looked down into the water and stared long at something Sam couldn’t see.

“Why?” The question seemed drawn out almost against his will and Sam clamped his mouth closed after the word had escaped.

“Why did he kill them? I don’t know, I never have.”

“So this guy screws you over and that’s all you can say?” Sam felt himself getting angry, not at Lucifer, but for him. What sort of real life event was this whole fantasy world covering for? What had been so damning that it could leave a man completely empty and broken, shards of glacial ice and echoing silences.

“Do you imagine I didn’t try to find out?” A spark of something as Lucifer turned and locked gazes, still half buried and remembered only as if from a dream. “When I went to ask him,” silence. One beat. Two beats. Three beats.

Sam realized he was counting his heartbeats as he waited for Lucifer to finish.

“I can’t say if killing my flock was the cause or the result, but Michael had gone mad. He had metamorphosed into something… other.” The word had a chilling connotation. “His madness had been given physical form and he had no words of wisdom to share with me, only rage. I escaped with my life, which was no blessing.”

“You think he wanted you to live through his attack?”

“I am certain of it.” A muscle danced in Lucifer’s jaw as he worked to not clench his teeth in remembrance. “He wanted me to be broken, bleeding, and utterly alone. He wanted me to die the slowest, most agonizing death imaginable--.”

“You don’t seem so bad off now,” Sam interrupted. He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, thoughts of tears between the dim and the dark and hollow eyes that reflected no soul. Whatever else Lucifer was, he wasn’t okay. “Sorry.”

“It’s... it’s alright.”

Sam could see that his apology had been completely unexpected as Lucifer momentarily floundered for words. “So, uh,” he tried to think of a bone he could throw him, something, anything to get rid of the clinging vestiges of that pain, “what exactly do you _do_ now? I mean, I’ve been travelling around with you for a couple months now and I still don’t get it.”

“I’ve watched you help build a house, pull a kid from a fire, sit on a park bench and talk to a homeless man, and a hundred other minutia.” This was still the long summer for Sam, he had a place to return to, however hollow the apartment would feel in the absence of Jess, but he never got that vibe from Lucifer. Somehow he knew with perfect certainty that the day he told Lucifer that he was leaving, he’d never again see the man, and Lucifer would disappear as if he’d never been.

Lucifer tiled his head to the side, “I help. There’s an energy in gratitude.”

“What, like grace?”

“Similar, although nowhere so potent.” The breeze picked up, the first sign of the approaching storm as the sky began to darken. “I learned a long time ago how to survive off very little, use very little. I keep moving because it’s in my bones, sewn into the spaces between my present and my future. I’ve lived nearly everywhere, a few years in Morocco, two decades in Lancaster, Nepal, Mesopotamia, Tenochtitlan, and now this summer on the road.”

“That doesn’t really sound like almost everywhere.”

Lucifer smirked, finally showing more emotion than a painting of a long passed winter’s day. “You don’t believe me. Is the fantasy easier to digest than reality?”

Hearing words so close to his own thoughts shocked Sam and he numbly tried to deny it. “No I… I believe that you believe it.”

“That’s not belief at all. That’s a philosophical understanding that reality is shaped by one’s own belief in it.” Sometimes Lucifer seemed so painfully lucid, razor wire wit and instantaneous repartee.

“I… fine. You’ve got me there, but come on. You’ve been telling me you’re a god. That’s,” Sam gestured hopelessly, trying to put words into meaningless kinetic motion. It didn’t explain his thoughts any better than his aborted sentence did.

“Insane,” Lucifer finished for him without judgment. “Yes, I know.”

“But you don’t care?”

“No. Of course I would like it if you believed me, but I’ve lived an eternity without faith, what’s one more skeptic?”

Sam could almost taste the pain. One more skeptic. “Alright, let’s say I humoured you, why would you want me to believe your story?”

The look that Lucifer gave him was far more eloquent than his own wordless gesticulation had been, and he instantly understood that this was all about faith.

“Would having a single person believe in you really make that much of a difference, even without worship and the whole nine yards?” That was what this boiled down to, wasn’t it? Whatever Lucifer’s malfunction was, he desperately needed to be believed in, not just believed.

“It would make all the difference in the world.”

A rain drop fell and caught on Sam’s eyelashes, blurring the world, and in that briefest of moments he thought he saw something shimmering and sliding just under the surface of Lucifer’s skin. By the time he blinked away the droplet, it was gone.


End file.
